Passion and Skills

Passion and Skills are not on opposite sides of the equation, they are multipliers of one another.

When you are truly passionate about something you will stop at nothing to do more about it, to grow with it and to learn more about it. Your hunger for your passion fuels the need to develop more skills/do more work.

The more you work at something, the better you become, the more you will like it and your passion will grow.

As an example, I hated swimming but I love triathlons, I have a passion for the full-distance triathlon.  The more I worked on swimming the more I actually liked it because I could see improvement in my swimming, my passion for triathlons grew even more. Looking at the bigger picture I have a passion for how much both swimming and triathlons taught me, how much it made me grow as a person and how it changed my outlook on life.

We get passion wrong, we focus too much on things or ideas. We want to be passionate about leadership, education, poverty or fill in the blank and we end up spending our whole lives trying to find our passion as if it has to be limited to one idea.

When was the last time you had passion for yourself; a passion to see yourself grow, to challenge yourself to become a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday? Have you ever had a passion to improve your process, to learn more, just to improve? This passion is what will get you further than anything else. If you have passion to be the best, you can excel at anything.

When we try to find passion we become lost and discouraged. We have a nagging voice in the back of our head, asking us if this is really the right thing for us. What if we started to we decided to be passionate about everything that we did. If instead of looking for passion we were open to passion coming to us, when we worked our ass off. Attract your passion, do not try and find it. I know some of you think you cannot be passionate about everything you do, you are wrong, you can. The problem real problem is you have too many things going on in your life.

The problem with the way we work, is how we view work. We separate the work that directly relates to our passion to all the other work that we have to do. Everything that you do, every act that you preform, can help you become better at what you are passionate about, especially when you focus on become passionate about yourself. When you have passion, it rarely feels like work, not because it is not work but because you focus on the passion. If we are passionate about getting better, work will no longer seem like work.

Passion and work are like building a log cabin. You build on top of one another not against them. Start Building.